Re: [patch] [sg]etaffinity hooks

From: Crispin Cowan (crispinat_private)
Date: Wed Oct 09 2002 - 18:37:27 PDT

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    Stephen Smalley wrote:
    
    >On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Crispin Cowan wrote:
    >  
    >
    >>That sounds kind of promising ... can you elaborate? I don't see how
    >>being able to mess with some other process's affinity does anything
    >>other than affect performance. How does this impinge on enforcing
    >>mandatory access controls?
    >>    
    >>
    >I'm not sure that this is fundamentally different than the already
    >existing hooks on operations like setpriority/nice.  In any event, for any
    >confidentiality policy (e.g. MLS), the affinity masks of processes can be
    >used as a channel to leak information in violation of the policy if we
    >cannot control setaffinity/getaffinity based on other security attributes
    >(e.g. the pair of MLS levels for the two processes).
    >
    I would avoid mentioning the covert channel. We have explicitly avoided 
    providing any defense against covert channels. IMHO, it is hopeless to 
    re-factor Linux to the degree necessary to even come close to closing 
    covert channels.
    
    >  For an integrity
    >policy, you want to be able to control the ability of a process of less
    >integrity to tamper with the CPU affinity of a process of greater
    >integrity, although the consequence may not be fatal.
    >
    This seems reasonable: appeal to the symmetry & completeness of hooking 
    both nice and affinity, and point out that neither is on a kernel fast-path.
    
    Crispin
    
    -- 
    Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
    Chief Scientist, WireX                      http://wirex.com/~crispin/
    Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
    Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
    
    
    
    

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